Kofi Awoonor
Quick answer: Kofi Awoonor craft guide: how the Ghanaian poet rebuilt the Ewe dirge in English, his key books from Rediscovery to The Promise of Hope, and lessons.
Kofi Awoonor (1935 to 2013) spent a lifetime carrying the Ewe dirge into English. Born in Wheta in Ghana's Volta region, he grew up hearing funeral songs performed by masters of the form, and he made their cadences the backbone of a modern poetry of loss, exile and return. His death was itself a public grief: he was killed in the terrorist attack on Nairobi's Westgate Mall while attending a literary festival.
Awoonor teaches something most craft books skip: how to inherit. He did not imitate traditional song or abandon it; he translated its grammar of lament into a personal instrument. Any poet who wants to use the oral forms of their own culture, from any continent, can study how he did it.
The dirge singer's apprentice
Awoonor, who published early work as George Awoonor-Williams, studied at the University of Ghana and later in London and at Stony Brook in New York. He was a diplomat as well as a writer, serving as Ghana's ambassador to Brazil and Cuba and its representative to the United Nations, and he spent a period imprisoned in Ghana in the 1970s, which produced The House by the Sea (1978).
His scholarly side matters to his craft. In Guardians of the Sacred Word he collected and translated Ewe oral poetry, including songs of the great dirge composer Vinoko Akpalu, whose lamenting persona echoes through Awoonor's own early poems. He knew the tradition as a researcher and inherited it as an artist.
The signature moves
These are the observable habits that make an Awoonor poem sound like no one else's.
What you can learn
Try grief in the plural. Draft an elegy in which you mourn as we, on behalf of a family, a street or a generation, and address the dead directly as if they could answer. Notice how the register changes: complaint becomes ceremony.
Learn also from his patience with one landscape. Awoonor's sea never runs out because he keeps asking it new questions. Choose the landscape you know in your bones and assign it a role in three different poems: witness, judge, destination. Emotion and language are two of the five criteria Writory's judges score each month, and the dirge tradition Awoonor mastered is a reliable school for both.
Where to start reading
The Promise of Hope: New and Selected Poems (2014), assembled with Kwame Dawes just before Awoonor's death, is the ideal single volume. From there go back to Rediscovery (1964) and Night of My Blood (1971) for the early dirge-driven work, The House by the Sea for the prison poems, and Guardians of the Sacred Word for the Ewe sources.
What poets can take from this
- Write an elegy in the first person plural, mourning on behalf of a community you belong to.
- Address a dead relative directly in a poem and include one question you expect them to answer.
- Build a stanza on parallel phrasing: three lines that begin with the same grammatical structure.
- Give one landscape from your childhood a speaking or listening role in your next poem.
- Read a draft aloud slowly and mark where the rhythm itself sounds like mourning; keep those lines.
Try it yourself
Write a dirge for something that is disappearing rather than dead: a language, a trade, a shoreline, a family house. Use repetition the way waves use the shore, returning with slight variation, and address the disappearing thing directly at least twice.
Questions
What is Kofi Awoonor best known for?
He is known for bringing the Ewe dirge tradition into modern English-language poetry, in collections such as Rediscovery and Night of My Blood, and for The Promise of Hope, the new and selected poems published just after his death in the Westgate Mall attack in 2013.
How did Kofi Awoonor die?
He was killed on 21 September 2013 in the terrorist attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, where he was due to perform at the Storymoja literary festival. Tributes from poets worldwide followed, and his final collection appeared months later.
What is an Ewe dirge?
It is a funeral song tradition of the Ewe people of Ghana and Togo, performed by skilled composers and marked by repetition, direct address to the dead, and communal lament. Awoonor both translated these songs and adapted their cadences in his own poems.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.